Human interactions are incredibly fascinating if you take a close look at them — the social awkwardness, the communication styles, the way knowledge is transferred, the way stories are told and trust is built. But what happens when a machine evokes the same response?
Conversational interfaces have become the new hotness in UX design. Google is about to release a new virtual assistant chatbot; Facebook has already launched the updated Messenger platform with chatbots; and Microsoft went as far as to claim that the operating system of the future isn’t Windows, but “conversation as a platform.”
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Chatbot fever has infected Silicon Valley. The leaders of virtually every tech giant — including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple — proclaim chatbots as the new websites, and messaging platforms as the new browsers.
“You should message a business just the way you would message a friend,” declared Mark Zuckerberg when he launched the Facebook Messenger Platform for bots. He and the rest of the tech world are convinced that conversation is the future of business.
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Three user interfaces (UIs) go to a pub. The first one orders a drink, then several more. A couple of hours later, it asks for the bill and leaves the pub drunk. The second UI orders a drink, pays for it up front, orders another drink, pays for it and so on, and in a couple of hours leaves the pub drunk.
The third UI exits the pub already drunk immediately after going in — it knows how the pubs work and is efficient enough not to lose time. Have you heard of this third one? It is called an “optimistic UI.
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Many apps today, such as Google Now, Spotify and Amazon, make assumptions about user preferences based on personal data. They may even use this information to make decisions on our behalf, without any direct input from us. For example, Facebook tailors your news feed and Amazon recommends products — both hiding “irrelevant” information and only showing what they think you will like.
This type of design pattern, where user choice is removed, has recently been coined “anticipatory design”. Its aim is to leverage data on user behavior to automate the decision-making process in user interfaces. The outcome lowers the excessive number of decisions people currently make, thereby reducing decision fatigue and improving decisions overall.
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In the past few months, chat bots have become very popular, thanks to Slack, Telegram and Facebook Messenger. But the chat bot idea is not new at all.
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Web and mobile apps are moving away from pages towards completely personalized experiences. These new experiences are built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. The way this content is now being presented is in the form of cards. The card-based interaction model is spreading pretty widely, and you can see digital cards almost everywhere — from news sites to food delivery apps.
In this article, I’ll explain what cards mean to UI designers, and I’ll review three popular card-based services. If you’re interested in prototyping your own card-based user interface, you can download and test Adobe’s Experience Design CC for free and get started right away.
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With the tools getting more user-friendly and affordable, virtual reality (VR) development is easier to get involved in than ever before. Our team at Clearbridge Mobile recently jumped on the opportunity to develop immersive VR content for the Samsung Gear VR, using Samsung’s 360 camera.
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Computers and human beings don’t speak the same language. So, to make interaction possible, we rely on graphical user interfaces (GUIs). But GUIs come with a natural barrier: People have to learn to use them. They have to learn that a hamburger button hides a menu, that a button triggers an action.
But with technology evolving and language recognition and processing improving, we are on a path that could make interaction with digital services more intuitive, more accessible and more efficient — through conversational interfaces.
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When launching an app, you need to spend a lot of time and resources to attract users. You can pull people into your app using a variety of means, including advertising, referral programs, public relations and content marketing. But when people finally download an app, they sometimes feel abandoned. You must clearly show users why they need your app.
Studies reveal that 90% of all downloaded apps are used only once and then eventually deleted by users. People often abandon apps because of a poorly designed interface or an overall negative experience. Instead of having their problem solved by the app, people get confused trying to wade through a jungle of screens, menus and buttons.
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Using a style guide to drive development is a practice that is gaining a lot of traction in front-end development — and for good reason. Developers will start in the style guide by adding new code or updating existing code, thereby contributing to a modular UI system that is later integrated in the application. But in order to implement a modular UI system, we must approach design in a modular way.
Modular design encourages us to think and design a UI and UX in patterns. For example, instead of designing a series of pages or views to enable a user to accomplish a task, we would start the design process by understanding how the UI system is structured and how its components can be used to create the user flow.
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